Brains of the Operation: Catching Up with Brian Lohnes and the New Season of Put Up or Shut Up

Yesterday, the second season of Put Up or Shut Up kicked off with a bar fight between CorteX Racing’s 1966 Ford Mustang and the mad-Stuttgart-scientists’ 2017 Porsche 911 Turbo S. The show is basically this: $10,000 is put-up between hand-picked match races, and the best-of-three wins. The series has seen everything from drag racing 18-wheelers to dirt modifieds duke it out, and it’s a no-nonsense look into the science of how these machines dominate their sports. We caught up with Brian Lohnes, friend of HRM and host of PUOSU, to see what’s brewing with the show and what wisdom hindsight has given him with a season behind him.

How did this carnival of horsepower begin?

Lohnes: “So the concept was pretty wide open. Freiburger at the time came to me and asked if I’d be interested in being involved with the show. And I said, of course I would, sounded like great opportunity but we didn’t even so much as have like a format really. We really started as kind of a blank sheet of paper. We all kind of bounced ideas around about what we wanted it to be and ultimately we all kind of met in the middle when it started to kind of obviously a motorsport show that showcases either motorsports that people don’t know a lot about or showcases traditional motorsports in a non-traditional format. And it’s funny because conceptually the show has changed some over time were like, at first it was going to be all about the 10-grand that somebody won for winning the show. And what’s evolved is there’s still money involved for the winner of the show, but we evolved way more into a showcase of racing in a fun way as opposed to just being about somebody winning 10-grand.

It was not going to be some overhype thing that everyone’s going to chuck and wrenches at each other and whatnot. It really needed to be about competition. And uh, in some episodes have been, you know a little bit more emotionally intense than others when you have people that do have a natural rivalry. But at the end of today, the highlight of the show is always the wheel-to-wheel or tractor-to-tractor battles that we’ve put on.”

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You’ve talked and written a lot about how different sportscasters have influenced you, but how does it feel to bring that childhood influence full-circle now as a full-time announcer with the NHRA?

Lohnes: “Incredible. I mean, it’s the most cliche thing ever, but it’s like you wake up and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, like this is actually what I get paid to do!’ To me, it’s like a kid who grew and was able to become a professional athlete. Really, to me, it’s like that. You grow up and he kind of idolize these guys and you’re looking at what they’re doing and you try to be like them. Not copying them, you try to put your mark on things to be able to do this thing professionally.

Growing up, what TV shows affected how you approached Put Up or Shut Up?

Lohnes: “For me it was American Sports Cavalcade, a show that was on TNN for 20 years and it was every Sunday. Back in the day before you had to get your paper TV guide and read it. But the cool thing about it was that we never knew, like week to week, what was going to be shown. So you could be watching one week and it would be the drag races and then the next week it would be swamp buggies and the weekend after that it will be a World of Outlaws race. That was a show that literally formulated by life because I loved watching it every week and learning something, and even when they did ridiculous things like the swamp buggies, they treated everything really seriously. So like you’re watching a swamp buggy race, and they treated those guys like they were Top Fuel racers and it was cool because the racers got respect.

And that’s like, to me, that’s like the most fun thing about what we’re doing with Put Up or Shut Up: no one has come to me and said we can only do this or that. We get to explore different things and honestly it’s kind of fun because you really get to see like you get to see people both like or dislike different things, like I was really interested to see what the response is going to be when we ran our first dirt track episode. People know me from drag racing and many were the kind of people started who watching the show at the beginning because we were doing drag racing stuff. Then when we were able to branch out of the drag strip, it really opened up our audience. So a lot of people were super excited that we weren’t just doing drag race and stuff and that’s what led to the road racing episode obviously.”

“Where’s the engine?” asks the film crew while filming the beauty shots of our 2017 Porsche Turbo S — a technologically belligerent, modern super car.

Now that you mention it, how did this shindig get together?

Lohnes: “So the way the matchup kind of shook out was we wanted to do something along these lines, like we wanted to do a modern pro-touring car and some sort of an exotic. And initially we were thinking about Mike Musto, to be honest with you, we wondered if Musto would race his Daytona against somebody. And so when I went to Mike, he says ‘I got a buddy who was tailor made for this.’ And I’m like, okay. And I had never met Filip , uh, and then when he showed me his car, I seen the car before because it had been featured in magazines and stuff like that. And thankfully Randy Pobst has as such a great relationship and presence with Motor Trendand the channel, he was all on-board. Then we looked at what was in the fleet, we got permission from Porsche and off we went!”

No bias, where did you place your bet before filming?

Lohnes: “Oh, without bias, I thought the Porsche was going to handle it, I thought the horse was going to out-handle the Mustang even though the Mustang had all the great chassis, big tires, and a bunch of horsepower and stuff. I figured: one, with Randy [who practically lives under the porch of Willow Springs, rent-free], and two, with the amount of technology in that car, that he was going to be a runaway. I had no conception that it would be literally a dead heat.”

One thing that seperates Put Up or Shut Up from other shows is the amount of data in the post-run breakdowns — how does this help put things in perspective?

Lohnes: “It’s really fun for me. So data acquisition on the car, you have info coming from all different directions, loads from all the corners, it accurately clock speeds and everything else. So the fun thing is a once that we get the data, we have it delivered to us in a bunch of different forms in terms of how you graph it, which axis of the graph is what. So we get to kind of look at it and go, ‘Okay, this is what’s interesting, let’s focus on this or that.’ So it’s kind of a neat element to be able to post-fact look at what happened and then decide you know, what you want to explain or what the numbers tell you.”

The data-logger’s brainbox is secured in the floor, providing accurate G-load and speed data.

What’s one of the unique difficulties from a production side that Put Up or Shut Up presents?

Lohnes: “One of the things that’s not really a challenge as much as it was one of my greatest joys is our production crew. Most of them aren’t racers and most of them have never been exposed to any of the things that we do. And so for me it’s always cool when we get to a shoot and everybody’s hanging out and drinking a beer the night before, like you talk to some of the guys that are running the cameras or the sound guys, and they’re like ‘We love doing the show because we get to do cool stuff,’ and we’re going to places that they’ve never been to. We’re seeing things they’ve never seen. To me it’s a great kind of test audience because ultimately, you know, somebody who’s never seen any of this stuff when they’re getting a look at it for the first time and they think it’s awesome, that’s when you know.

But challenge wise? Logistics — it’s one thing to come up with an idea and it’s another thing to find a racetrack, rent the race track on the dates that you want it, then get to racers who aren’t going to blow their stuff up the week before trying to test it or aren’t going to flake out and not show up. That’s the part that keeps me up at night, we come up with a lot of great ideas and then it’s actually getting the rubber to the road, so to speak, is what’s hard. and it’s getting easier, it gets way easier when the show has the notoriety which it has gotten so far. So when you call up and you ask them if they’d want to do it, they know what it’s all about, and that helps a lot.”

It’s a good problem to have for our automotive culture, but with the explosion of shows in recent years — especially in drag racing — how does Put Up or Shut Up try to stand out?

Lohnes: “Yeah, no, there’s a ton of stuff on right now! So, how do you stand out? And for me it’s like, I think my involvement in the sport of drag racing [as an announcer for NHRA, Drag Week, countless local races, and even land speed events], it’s a benefit in the sense that I know a lot of the gems that a lot of people don’t know. You know, there’s a lot of big obvious things people know about, you know, whether we’re talking about the normal NHRA or Street Outlaws stuff, but there is so much awesome variety in drag racing. We’re going to shoot an episode with Top Fuel dirt drag racing motorcycles. We’re going to that next month, and I guarantee you there’s a tiny handful of people in the world that even know that guy’s race 2,000hp motorcycles on the dirt.

Dream match-ups, go:

Lohnes: “I want to drag race one of the top level swamp buggies versus an airboat. There’s an airboat drag strip in Florida that’s only two and a half feet of water, so I want to put one of the bad ass, blown big-block, mountain-motor swamp buggies up against an airboat in an eighth mile swamp drag race.

Also no-bar-style motorcycle — like no wheelie-bar style bikes — they run mid-to-high 6 in the quarter, 220, 230 miles an hour, and put it up against a Pro Stock car.”

“Where’s the engine?” asks the film crew while filming the beauty shots of our 2017 Porsche Turbo S — a technologically belligerent, modern super car.